Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Salil and Kiran Pande, Co-Founders of VMock (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: When you went out to raise money, you didn’t pitch it as an AI company?

Salil Pande: I didn’t pitch to anyone. All my seed investment came from my ex-boss. He connected to his ex-boss.

Sramana Mitra: Friends and family.

Salil Pande: Yes, through that network. Through that network, we did a Series A investment. I went to IIT Kanpur and I was giving a presentation. I was trying to bulldoze my interview solution on them. One guy came to me and said, “I know you have a very good solution for interviews, but all of us here are struggling with resumes.” I didn’t know how to go about it till we figured out how we were going to build our solution. We’re going to provide feedback to students on their resumes.

We launched it at IIT Delhi. Before we knew it, it went on to 50 to 100 plus schools in no time. Everyone was getting feedback. We just wanted to do things our own way. We didn’t know what the business model was. We struggled a lot trying to figure out a business model in India.

Eventually, I met with one of the career services directors in the US. He took me for a Starbucks coffee. He said, “Salil, what you’ve built is marvelous. This is going to change the game for career services. We have no energy to help every student. You take it from zero to 70 and leave it to us. We’ll take it from 70 to 100.”

Sramana Mitra: When you launched this, you didn’t think of career services as your primary customer. You were solving a problem for the students, but you didn’t know how you were going to monetize this.

Salil Pande: There were some thoughts, but the model was not clear. Why should they pay? Where is the volume? What is the pain point? Where is the efficiency being created? People are coming out and saying that VMock has saved me 3,400 hours. 

Sramana Mitra: What year did you get started?

Salil Pande: We started in 2009 when Kiran was coming out of Kellogg. We took our Series A funding in 2015. 

Sramana Mitra: That seed funding that you talked about, when did that come in?

Salil Pande: That was 2012 and 2013. 

Sramana Mitra: What happened between 2009 and 2012?

Salil Pande: I kept wandering from one place to the other thinking about where is the business model. This is not a product that existed. I didn’t know what I was going to create. I had an idea about the interview platform. We did some pilot here and there.

Sramana Mitra: The mock interview platform has existed for a while. I’ve seen case studies of it.

Salil Pande: For me, it was not clear that something was sustainable and scalable, especially putting people on the other side was a big pain.

Kiran Pande: When I look back at that, this was a sophisticated problem. If you wanted to solve it with technology, the reason why we ended up using AI is not because we wanted to be an AI shop. The real reason was that there was no other way that we could do what we wanted to do. In the initial stages, there was a lot of back and forth. That was primarily because we were dealing with an outsourced setup. I was in the US and the outsourced setup was here in India.

Sramana Mitra: If your core business is dependent on hardcore technology, it is very difficult to do innovation in an outsourced mode. I fully agree with you.

Salil Pande: We also got caught up with the fact that we were going to be in two markets. That elongated the journey. 

Sramana Mitra: Two markets as in the consumer student market and some sort of career development market, or two different geographical markets?

Salil Pande: Geographical.

Kiran Pande: The IIT’s were very interested. Then, we also had some people in the US who were very interested. Straddling two markets early on is not the right way to go. Start somewhere, focus, and expand that.

Sramana Mitra: Eventually, where did you focus?

Salil Pande: We decided to build our platform in India, but market to the US.

Sramana Mitra: Through the career development office?

Salil Pande: Yes, those offices are very mature.

Kiran Pande: They also were able to provide the data. They have data to provide you to build your system.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Salil and Kiran Pande, Co-Founders of VMock
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